Trump Administration Destroys the Systems that Support and Protect America’s Children

Posted on by

In an important column, the President of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley names what ought to be our nation’s social policy agenda, if justice and equity are the goals we seek:

  • “demanding a Child Tax Credit that actually reaches the children who need it most;
  • “rejecting the dismantling and undermining of our nation’s public schools and the federal Department of Education, as children deserve federal champions of their fundamental educational rights rather than federal retreat;
  • “protecting child care and funding early education programs, including Head Start;
  • “restoring health programs by reversing the cuts to Medicaid, making the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) permanent, and putting science at the forefront of vaccine and medical research programs rather than ideology… and
  • “treating every child, regardless of income or status, as fully human and fully deserving of fulfilling their… potential.”

By contrast, Lesley identifies the Trump administration’s ‘Stephen Miller and Russ Vought playbook’ now driving public policy. The new Miller-Vought agenda, “recognizes that the public overwhelmingly supports children’s issues. Thus, rather than attack children directly, they seek to ‘otherize’ kids by category, imposing ‘deservingness’ exclusions on their parents and dividing the nation into in-groups and out-groups. Leslie describes the new playbook: demonizing and deporting immigrant children; attacking LGBTQ children; targeting low-income children by excluding them from benefits “with rules and restrictions that sound neutral but function like walls and barriers”; targeting Black and Brown parents; threatening religious minority groups; closing programs for rural children; and embracing partisan politics and targeting blue states “with cuts and exclusions.”

Lesley’s example is last week’s injustice when the Trump administration imposed a sudden funding freeze on federal funds for child care and family support on five states:  Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado: “The Trump Administration—citing vague concerns about fraud stemming from a misleading video by a known provocateur—suspended payments to programs that keep day cares open, staff employed, and parents able to work across Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota. Strangely, the administration added four other states to the freeze with seemingly no evidence of fraud beyond partisan politics.  But there are no red children and blue children. There are just children.”

Lesley cites a new analysis from First Focus staff—Chad Bolt, economic policy; Lily Klam, early childhood and education policy; and Averi Pakulis, early childhood and health policy—exploring what will be the impact of the administration’s recent funding freeze on essential programs for the poorest families in five states with large populations of children at risk: “In its latest attack on children, the Trump administration has announced that it will withhold at least $7.35 billion in funding for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), $2.4 billion in child care funding, and $870 million in Social Services Block Grant funding from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The administration asserts, without evidence, that these states have allowed the funding to be used fraudulently. While fraud must be prevented through strong oversight, this can and must be done without punishing children… Children are once again collateral damage in a political battle.”

Here are some of the details these experts provide to help us all grasp the on-the-ground meaning of these programs being frozen:

  • TANF     “Since expiration of the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansions, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program stands as one of the only federal programs providing monthly cash assistance to families with low incomes. TANF supports millions of children and families thorough cash assistance as well as child care subsidies, state tax credits, food banks and other aid. Nearly 70% of TANF recipients are children. By withholding TANF funding from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, the Trump administration is cutting off 55.8% of the total number of children who benefit from TANF nationally….”
  • Child Care     “The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which includes the discretionary Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and the mandatory Child Care Entitlement to States provides vital support to families… Freezing CCDF funding for these five states will delay payments that child care providers rely on to survive, cause confusion and stress for families and providers alike, and potentially result in a loss of care. This freeze would impact 23.7% of children from low-income families who rely on child care subsidies from the federal government in these five states, plus children who don’t receive direct child care support but attend child care centers that receive federal funding, for a total of over 500,000 children.”
  • Child Welfare and Protective Services     “The Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) funds essential child welfare programs, including child protective services, foster care, and support for struggling families, as well as child care in some states.  Freezing SSBG funds could reduce the number of child protective services workers… weaken foster care support, forcing states to cut services for children in need; rob families facing crises of needed resources, increasing homelessness and instability…”

In his column last week, Bruce Lesley highlights the moral implications for our society of the cascade of federal actions after last week’s tragedy in Minneapolis when a child was orphaned during a protest against the surge of ICE agents:

“While the debate has largely focused on fault, more people need to be asking questions about what happens to this child now. Unfortunately in our political system, children are too often invisible, especially when the policies and actions that harm them are wrapped in the language of law enforcement, border security, or fiscal discipline… Schools in Minneapolis were placed on lockdown and are now closed out of concern for children’s welfare. Parents have kept their kids home to stay out of harm’s way…. This week of fear, lockdowns, and mourning is only one of a number of calamities for children at the hands of its own government. It’s a symptom of a much larger, more deliberate pattern. In the same week that a child was orphaned by a government gun, the federal government also took a number of ill-fated steps to rip away support systems for other children across Minnesota and the entire country… It’s what happens when federal policymakers begin treating children not as a group that deserves to be protected, but as line items to be eliminated. This is what ‘organized abandonment’ looks like. It is part of a deliberate hollowing out and defunding of the systems that help protect the health, education, development, safety, and well-being of children.”

Trump’s Dept. of Ed. Waives Some Federal Oversight for Iowa: A New Trend?

Posted on by

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law scholar Derek Black explores one of the most basic reasons our public schools, our society’s most extensive and inclusive civic institution, are essential: they are an enormous system whose promise is to serve the needs and protect the rights of nearly 50 million children and adolescents.  Justice cannot be achieved solely through the protection of parents’ rights, by which parents vie to advance their own children’s needs.

Black writes: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good.  As a practical matter, it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best, it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst, it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the past half century trying to tame…  Public schools to be sure, are far from perfect. They have never fully met the needs of all students and all communities. But those shortcomings are clearly understood as problems to fix. They are seen as bugs, not features, of public education, which has operated for two centuries on the premise that public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government. And public schools are the only place in society premised on bridging the gaps that normally divide us—race, wealth, religion, disability, sex, culture, and more. The founders of the American public education system believed that rather than inhibiting liberty, a common public education is essential to it.” (Dangerous Learning, pp. 182-183)

Widespread educational justice across the nation cannot be achieved solely through the laws of the states. At the federal level, Brown v. Board of Education, and federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have for three quarters of a century been tools by which the federal government could challenge and rectify injustice in public schools.  In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was founded to pull together many of the programs designed to increase opportunity for children in states whose public schools had failed to protect their educational rights due to their race, ethnicity, or disability—the work of the Office for Civil Rights, and programs supporting English language learners and special education for disabled students, for example.  The Education Department also increased investment in school districts which states had inadequately funded—Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children, for example, and grants for Full-Service Community Schools and 21st Century After-School Programs.

The Trump administration has, however, avoided acknowledging the history of educational injustice as the President has consistently promoted the goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and “returning education to the states.”  When she was confirmed as Education Secretary last March, Linda McMahon declared: “President Trump pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice. I intend to make good on that promise.”  McMahon has laid off staff whose positions were created by Congress, threatened to send specific programs to other federal departments, and cancelled a raft of specific, congressionally allocated grant funding —all contrary to federal law. Many of these threats have been temporarily stayed by the courts; others are quietly moving forward.

Last week, McMahon took a new step to weaken the Department’s reach—by agreeing to waive federal rules that prescribe how federal funding can be spent and allowing states to combine at their discretion funding from specific federal grant lines. For the Associated Press, Colin Binkley explained: “The Trump administration is giving Iowa more power to decide how it spends its federal education money, signing off on a proposal that is expected to be the first of many as conservative states seek new latitude from a White House promising to ‘return education to the states.’ Iowa was the first state to apply for an exemption from certain spending rules.”  Binkley describes Education Secretary McMahon’s justification for giving Iowa control of spending federal dollars from four different grant programs: “McMahon told The Associated Press that the new flexibility will free up time and money now devoted to ensuring compliance with federal rules. With fewer strings attached, states can pool their federal dollars toward priorities of their choosing, including literacy or teacher training….”

For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel lists four separate programs established by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act whose funding streams Iowa has been permitted to combine: Title II, Part A—Supporting Effective Instruction; Title III, Part A—English Language Acquisition; Title IV, Part A—Student Support and Academic Enrichment; and Title IV, Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs). Arundel describes Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds expressing gratitude for giving her state more freedom: “Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, speaking at the press conference, said the state is ‘confident that we can do even more by reallocating compliance resources. Iowa will begin shifting nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.’ ”

Several writers, looking at the modesty of last week’s Iowa waiver to consolidate grants are not yet anticipating that the Iowa situation bodes massive deregulation of federal funding.  Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman explains: “The waiver approval appears to mark the first time since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Success Act that the federal government has used its authority under that law to allow a state to consolidate funding. But, in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.”

Binkley reassures the public: “Iowa’s new plan leaves Title I funding untouched.”

Lieberman quotes Anne Hyslop, who now leads All4Ed, and who worked in the Department during the Obama administration: “This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop… It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements in October.”

Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer adds States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately… Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money.

However, the reporters acknowledge that, in the context of the Trump administration’s goal to return education to the states, the Department may increasingly grant waivers that limit federal oversight.  Will Iowa’s waiver be the first step as the Department of Education reduces guardrails that protect students’ civil rights?

Meltzer reports that the new waiver, “does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called  Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies….”  Lieberman adds: “Separate from the waiver approval, McMahon also simultaneously announced she’s approved Iowa to join 10 other states currently participating in the department’s Ed-Flex program, which gives state education agencies the authority to waive certain spending regulations for individual districts… The 10 states currently participating are Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Iowa is the first state to gain the distinction since McMahon became secretary.”

Meltzer concludes by cautioning readers: “(T)he Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.” She quotes Hyslop worrying: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general.”

Specifically, Meltzer warns that one of the federal grants Iowa was allowed to merge supported English language instruction, a step that could well reflect the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants or its anti-DEI initiatives: “Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners…. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the ‘bible’ in that field.” She quotes the Education Trust’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney: “I think of red tape equaling protections for students… We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”

Will 2026 be the year that the Department of Education expands the use of waivers to undercut the federal oversight of funds that protect equality of educational opportunity across our nation?  We will need to watch carefully as the chaotic education policy in McMahon’s Department of Education continues into its second year.

Complex Issues Rumble Beneath Plan to Close Cleveland Schools

Posted on by

Despite that voters in the the Cleveland (Ohio) school district passed an operating levy in 2024 that will continue to raise roughly $49 million in additional property taxes every year, on December 9, 2025, the school board voted unanimously to restructure the school district, including the closure of 23 school buildings and consolidation of other small schools into the same building.  Keep in mind that in this year’s state budget, the Ohio Legislature failed fully to enact, as promised, the Fair School Funding Plan, a new state funding formula which would have helped districts like Cleveland afford to provide adequate services for students.

The Plain Dealer‘s Sean McDonnell reported the details of the district’s new consolidation plan: “Cleveland’s school board unanimously approved a plan… that drastically consolidates the school district’s footprint ahead of the 2026-27 school year. Cleveland Metropolitan School District will close 23 buildings and operate 29 fewer schools, changes CEO Warren Morgan says are needed to confront steep drops in enrollment and a looming $150 million deficit… CMSD will save about $30 million a year, mainly by reducing administrative staff to serve fewer schools. Pre-K through eighth-grade schools will drop from 61 to 45. High schools will drop from 27 to 14.”

While the press has reported on the details of the closure of some schools and the merging of others, we have not been reading enough about several deeper issues underneath what is being discussed as a straight-forward school consolidation plan whose purpose is primarily to address a district-wide financial deficit.

District-Wide Equity

When the plan was first publicly released back in November, McDonnell quoted CEO Morgan describing an additional purpose for the restructure: “Consolidation… will allow CMSD to offer a better education to more students… He said… that Cleveland’s schools have ‘pockets of excellence.’ Some schools have great academics and other have great sports programs. But to offer all students an excellent education and extracurriculars, action is needed.”

Here we begin to see that beneath the details of the Cleveland school consolidation plan is a complex philosophical debate about one of the thorniest policy issues we have been watching for two decades now. Which students’ needs get served well and which students find their needs needs are left out in a fiscal climate when public funds are scarce? And in a district with district-wide school choice, is it a good idea to let savvy parents extract their students into special places with more advanced programs?

Seasoned education reporter, Patrick O’Donnell, who used to cover public education for the Plain Dealer, now writes for The 74, where O’Donnell recently explored the pending loss of Cleveland’s special small schools from the point of view of something called “portfolio school reform theory,” which was the basis of a 2012 restructure called the Cleveland Plan. Portfolio school reform was developed around the idea of school district management of universal school choice and breaking up comprehensive high schools into small, specialty high schools.

In his recent article, O’Donnell profiles a small, science high school that will no longer exist as a stand-alone institution under the consolidation passed by the Cleveland school board last month: “(A)s part of budget cuts and a change in district priorities away from the small schools model that was once popular nationally, MC²STEM won’t exist anymore. Instead, it’s being turned into just a STEM program at a high school in the poorest neighborhood in the city. The school is the most dramatic casualty in a major reorganization and reduction of schools… The cuts come as the district… changes its philosophy from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools… With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing the once-popular movement in districts across the country of carving up big schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland adopted the small schools approach heavily in the early 2000s as well as the similar ‘portfolio’ school district model that downplays large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a choice of many schools with different approaches… In Cleveland… several specialized high schools—including MC²STEM, two early college high schools, two schools that teach medicine by partnering with hospitals, and an aviation and maritime school helping students earn pilot licenses—will all become programs within large combined schools.”

O’Donnell highlights the strength of schools like MC²STEM, but as Morgan, Cleveland’s School District CEO, discusses the new consolidation plan, Morgan names the injustice that has emerged in so-called “portfolio” school district plans that break up large high schools and feature small, specialty schools that cater, in an environment of universal school choice, to students with particular interests or skills. After the school board passed the new plan the Plain Dealer again quoted Morgan emphasizing that a primary goal of today’s district-wide consolidation is equal access for the district’s students across all schools to an expanded curriculum: “It will be worth it because 100% of CMSD scholars will have better opportunities, including expanded access to Algbra 1, computer tech, sports, career and college prep.  100% of our buildings will soon be new or upgraded, providing safe and equitable teaching and learning environments.”

What about Charter Schools?

While CEO Warren Morgan and the school board have presented the need for a massive consolidation of schools and school closures to save $30 million every year as a response to a “looming $150 million deficit,” the press has, to my knowledge, not explored the fact that the Cleveland school district continues to divert local property tax revenue to a group of charter schools that are said to partner with the district. Last February, for The 74, Patrick O’Donnell summarized the history of the growing diversion of local levy money as a sort of bonus to high-scoring Cleveland charter schools that, like all charter schools in Ohio, are already funded on a per-pupil basis from the state budget: “The district’s financial support of charter schools, controversial when it started in 2012, has continued and even doubled over time. In 2012, after the Ohio legislature approved the plan, the district started sharing more than $5 million a year with selected charters with strong academic results, that served almost entirely Cleveland kids and that agreed to share data and expansion plans with the district. The district is now sharing more than $10 million with 11 partnering charters, most of them with the Breakthrough Schools, the state’s highest-rated charter school chain and which helped create the Cleveland Plan.”

A key fact about the 2012 Cleveland Plan was that the school reform plan was enacted through state legislation. It was therefore not the school district’s decision to share its property tax revenue with charter schools. The district, which will close a mass of local elementary and high schools to save $30 million annually, does not have the power to stop giving away $10 million every year to the district’s most powerful charter schools whose operators helped negotiate the Cleveland Plan in the first place. State politics are likely to ensure that legislators continue to protect the local school district’s investment in the budgets of these particular charter schools. It is shocking that no one in the press, to my knowledge, has explored the loss of $10 million annually as an added bonus for well-connected charter schools at the same time Cleveland’s public schools are in the midst of a fiscal crisis.

What Will the School Consolidation Plan Mean for the Community?

While the Plain Dealer has reported on which schools will be closed or merged with other schools and the board’s purpose for instituting the plan, Signal Cleveland, an independent, non-profit local newsroom, has begun to explore the implications for families, students and educators.  One article addresses 18 key questions that include: the difference between closed or merged programs; the district’s promise to add more academic programs; how career training programs will change; how high school specialty tracks will be merged; what will happen to teachers and staff; and the implications for special education students.  Another Signal Cleveland reporter interviews students to examine what it will mean for them as Collinwood High School is closed and its students move into rival Glenville High School.

It will be urgently important for the press to continue exploring the challenges for the students who must change schools as well as for the students at schools receiving an influx of new students. Teachers and administrators will also face a huge adjustment, and in the neighborhoods where schools are closed, residents will look at the empty buildings and grieve the loss of former community anchors.

University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing traced widespread community grieving that accompanied Chicago’s closure of 50 neighborhood schools in 2013:

“There is the symbolic weight of a school as a bastion of community pride, and also the fear that losing the school means conceding a battle in a much larger ideological war over the future of a city and who gets to claim it. There is the need to consider that losing the school represents another assault in a long line of racist attacks against a people… There is our intensely segregated society to account for, in which those who attend the school experience a fundamentally different reality than those who have the power to steer its future. And finally, there is the intense emotional aftermath that follows school closure, which can have a profound, lasting effect on those who experience the closure even as it is rarely acknowledged with any seriousness by those who made the decision.”

Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closures should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions… What is the history that has brought us to this moment? How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p.159)

Trump’s Education Department Axes Grants for Full-Service Community Schools

Posted on by

The late, great David Berliner was the Regents’ professor emeritus in the psychology of education at Arizona State University, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, and the former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State.  In the first chapter of The Manufactured Crisis, a book he co-authored 30 years ago with another academic expert on education, Bruce Biddle, he derided what he saw as the misdirection of education reform ideas developed as a response to the 1983 A Nation at Risk report: “One of the worst effects of the Manufactured Crisis has been to divert attention away from the real problems faced by American education—problems that are serious and that are escalating in today’s world… (A)lthough many Americans do not realize it, family incomes and financial support for schools are much more poorly distributed in our country than in other industrialized nations. This means that in the United States, very privileged students attend some of the world’s best private and public schools, but it also means that large numbers of students who are truly disadvantaged attend public schools whose support is far below that permitted in other Western democracies.” (The Manufactured Crisis, pp. 4-5)

Then, in a 2017 analysis, Berliner listed some of the factors that underlie the test score achievement gap that No Child Left Behind was supposed to have addressed: “It’s neither this nation’s teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are… families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

We tend to think of these problems as though they reside exclusively in urban places where poverty is concentrated, but journalist Beth Macy just published Paper Girl to expose the very same issues in Urbana, Ohio, a small, MAGA town located in Jim Jordan’s Congressional district.

In a policy strategy left over from No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime, lawmakers seem to believe that a teacher’s role is to produce test scores, that prescribed strategies like the Science of Reading and the Third Grade Guarantee will raise test scores, and that state takeovers of so-called failing schools will force teachers to work harder and smarter. But more thoughtful educators and policymakers have looked instead to reforms that surround vulnerable families with support. Full-Service Community Schools, designed to wrap medical and social services, and extracurricular enrichment programs right into the school building, have grown in their reach and are now valued by families and educators.

The Trump administration has begun canceling Full-Service Community Schools grants.  In December, however, the Trump administration cancelled $168 million in federal grants from the Education Department’s Full-Service Community Schools program. Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “Those 19 grants—spread across 11 states and the District of Columbia—amounted to nearly $61 million in funds that were due to flow Jan. 1, and another $107 million that was due to flow by 2028.  The loss of those funds could lead to layoffs for dozens of public school educators nationwide within weeks.  In Idaho alone, 60 community schools coordinators across 47 rural school districts have salaries funded in part or in full with the now-excised grant funds.”

Why cut grants from a federal program that has continued to grow due to the documented effectiveness of Full-Service Community Schools? Lieberman explains: “Grant cancellations are part of Trump efforts to eradicate DEI. The Trump administration has argued in ‘notices of non-continuation’ to affected grantees that the programs in question may be promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that top federal officials have characterized as divisive and harmful. Community schools advocates, though, describe their mission as a painstaking, constantly evolving, and research-backed effort to identify and meet the specific needs of students and their families—ranging from unemployment and food insecurity to difficulty accessing medical care and navigating bureaucracy.”

What is a Full-Service Community School?  Community Schools are public schools which collaboratively incorporate additional professional social and medical services, and additions like after-school programs right in the public school building. While in Ohio, the state calls privately operated charter schools “community schools,” Full-Service Community Schools are not the same as charter schools.

New York City’s Children’s Aid Society has a history of 25 years of experience operating community schools as part of New York City’s public schools, and operates 19 public community schools today. The Children’s Aid Society defines a community school: “The community school strategy delivers holistic services for children and families, connecting them to resources in their communities and fostering academic success… No two community schools look alike. When we partner with a school to make it a community school, we assess the needs of that student population and community. At all of our community schools, we are placing an emphasis on chronic absenteeism. We offer services that improve attendance and get the entire family involved in the academic success of their children… Services at a community school can include comprehensive health services, after-school academic enrichment, mentoring, parent engagement, and more.”

For The Progressive, education writer Jeff Bryant further explores what community schools do: “The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.”

More recently Bryant reported on new research confirming the effectiveness of the model: “According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization RAND, schools in New York City using the community school strategy experienced… positive results. Compared to similarly matched non-community schools, community schools saw higher graduation rates; decreased chronic absenteeism, especially among Black students and high school students in temporary housing; fewer disciplinary incidents among elementary and middle school students; and significantly improved measures of student achievement—such as math scores, credit accumulation, and on-time grade progression.”

What does the Trump administration’s slashing of Community School Grants mean?  Clearly the Trump administration’s sudden cancellation of Full-Service Community Schools grants is part of the administration’s broad attempt to scrub from federal policy any program or policy that furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education, to include, welcome, and equitably serve students in groups that have been historically marginalized. Education Department staff have not been subtle about the administration’s redefinition of civil rights protection.  In a second article on the sudden cancellation of community school grants, Mark Lieberman reported: “Education Week reviewed one letter dated Dec. 12 announcing the non-continuation of a Community Schools grant. The stated reason for the cuts will look familiar to more than 200 other federal education grant recipients across close to 20 other programs that have received nearly identical letters in recent months as the Trump administration screens grants and pulls the plug on anything it claims is related to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion…”

Lieberman quotes: “Madi Biedermann, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, (who) wrote in an email that the Trump administration is generally repurposing non-continued grants into ‘high quality programs that better serve special needs students… The Trump administration is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot—we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.’ ”

Lieberman reports that last week the Department of Education also cancelled a grant for “at least one recipient of a Promise Neighborhoods grant.” While federal support for Community schools goes back decades, the Promise Neighborhoods program was launched by the Obama Administration to “bolster… academic and social supports for children in high-need neighborhoods.”  Lieberman adds that both Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods were “zeroed out” of Trump’s proposed federal budget for education last year.  While the U.S. Senate’s proposed  education budget last summer fully funded both programs, the GOP- dominated appropriations committee in the  U.S. House proposed a budget that would end both programs. In Russell Vought’s federal shutdown layoffs, only one staff member was left in the office that oversees these grants. Then, “Congress passed a law in November rescinding those layoffs, but employment for those workers is only assured through Jan. 30.”

Lieberman contrasts Trump’s cancellation of funding for community schools with the Biden Administration’s increase in 2023 of annual funding for community schools from $25 million to $150 million.

AFT files a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s cancellation of grants for community schools. Last week, Education Week reported that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council filed a lawsuit to block the termination of grants for Full-Service Community Schools and charged that the Education Department “cut off funding without notice, without lawful justification, and without following required procedures.”  EdSource adds: “The plaintiffs also have asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the department from withholding the funds while the court hears the case.”

AFT’s Randi Weingarten points out that “there was no communication with districts or even a request to ask for modifications. These grants were simply terminated on a whim.”  Patrick Brosnan, who leads Chicago’s Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, declared that programs supported by the cancelled grant, “advanced the stated mission of the U.S. Department of Education Full-Service Community School grant to support low-income students and families in our community, to ensure their access to high-quality after-school academic support, and to provide technical and career support to help mold the workforce of the future.”

Community schools have been among the most effective strategies to address the effects of family and neighborhood poverty — the educational opportunity gaps that David Berliner and other experts blame for disparities in standardized achievement test scores.  Because federal dollars help school districts pay for the professionals who coordinate social service programs with the academic programs in a community school and pay for medical and social service professionals who provide specific services, the loss of federal funding will imperil the future of Full-Service Community Schools.

As 2026 Dawns, Future of Civil Rights Protection in K-12 Public Schools and Higher Ed. Looks Bleak Under Trump Administration

Posted on by

Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

Happy Holidays! This blog will take a break and return on Tuesday, January 6, 2026.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.

For-Profit Immigrant Prison Will Hire For-Profit Virtual Charter School for Children Detained for Months

Posted on by

This is a story I would never have imagined I’d be covering in this blog whose purpose is to consider the needs of children in the United States today and their education. For me this story calls to mind Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a dark and penetrating novel about a child born and raised in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison where her family is incarcerated due to her father’s debt. The novel is also about the moral corruption permeating an effete, mid-19th century British society that quietly imprisons whole families for debt. Today we imprison and subsequently expel families for being immigrants, even though most of our ancestors were immigrants. Little Dorrit, Dickens’ eleventh novel, captures a society awash in money, speculation, fraud, and pretension, a society that has abandoned the poor, and a government indifferent to its basic responsibilities. It is alarming to recognize how well Dickens’ old novel describes our own U.S. society during Donald Trump’s second term.

Last week, The American Prospect‘s Whitney Curry Wimbish covered the plight of children living at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, a prison for immigrant families awaiting extradition by ICE. It is a story set in 2025 in the United States about the mass roundup of immigrant families for deportation; a private, for-profit prison; and an online, for-profit charter school. While the operators of the immigrant detention prison and the operators of the online charter school the prison plans to open are both making gobs of money through the private contracting of services, there is no hint that they worry about about protecting the well-being of children, and there is no mention of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe that protects the rights of all children living in the United States to a free public education. These children have been captured by ICE and are being held with their parents in a prison.

Stride, formerly K12 Inc., an online charter school management company is described by Wimbish as a “a $2 billion online education company that reportedly served 220,000 students in 31 states last year. Formerly McKinsey & Co. consultant Ron J. Packard founded the company in 2000 with $40 million in venture capital backing from Oracle’s Larry Ellison and junk bond king Michael Milken, among others.”  Stride Schools have different names across the states; in Ohio, for example, Stride operates the Ohio Virtual Academy.

CoreCivic is described by Wimbish as, “one of two major for-profit prison operators, whose fortunes have risen drastically under the Trump regime.” CoreCivic operates the South Texas Family Residential Center, an immigrant family prison in Dilley, Texas, which has set out to open some kind of education program. Wimbish explains why: “The establishment of a school is an effort to sanitize the extended detention of hundreds of children at Dilley, which violates a court settlement established 28 years ago. Under that settlement, children may not be held in immigration prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. But a recent court filing claims that ICE has held hundreds of children for well beyond that limit, in some cases for multiple months, and subjected them to neglect and abuse.”

Wimbish emphasizes that the South Texas Family Residential Center has continued to violate federal law by failing to protect children and by failing to provide adequate services for their education, all in violation of “the Flores Settlement Agreement, the 1997 legal requirement for the government to meet basic standards of care and oversight for children it holds in immigration prisons. Under the agreement, the government must provide education to immigration prisoners 17 years old and younger, along with adequate food, water, clothes, and medical attention. The government also must transfer children to a licensed, nonsecure child care facility after 20 days.” Right now at the South Texas Family Residential Center, “There’s no adequate education or recreation at the prison for children… Children reported that the educational program that currently exists is little more than an hour of drawing in a classroom so crowded that some children are turned away. Opening a new school is meant to resolve this inadequacy. But even if it is instituted, the facility would still not be licensed, and children would not be able to leave the facility, violating both tests set up by the Flores settlement.”

It doesn’t seem as though the CoreCivic for-profit prison looked to the public schools in the area for support or even sought the best possible private provider. If you are interested in mere court compliance and not worried about the kind of instruction you are providing for children and adolescents, you might go for an alliance with a big, for profit provider.  And since there would likely be continuing turnover of students, you might try to get by with an online, computer driven school, where teachers are there mostly to provide some supervision. “There’s no indication how big the school will be or when it will open…  The posting for the school’s principal says whoever holds that job will directly supervise 15 to 30 full-time equivalent regular employees and/or contractors. Postings for instructors, such as one for a high school English teacher, say they will be responsible ‘for a minimum of 20 students’ in two daily four-hour sessions. Immigration advocates said they expect the school to open in January.”

It would seem that one huge, for-profit company went for a handy collaboration with another big company. Did CoreCivic investigate Stride’s questionable reputation?  “Earlier this month, securities law firm Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP announced a class action lawsuit against Stride and its senior executives for defrauding investors by lying about enrollment figures and failing to disclose ‘a catastrophic technology failure’…   Two events prompted the claim. The first was in August, when New Mexico’s Gallup-McKinley County Schools announced it had severed all ties with Stride, which it had contracted to provide online education to its students, most of whom are Indigenous, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the school district, during its tenure Stride repeatedly violated state law and failed to provide adequate education to such an extent that graduation rates plummeted, along with academic proficiency in all subjects. During the 2023-2024 school year, the proficiency rate for reading dropped to less than 23 percent and math dropped to less than 6 percent, while fewer than 23 percent of students graduated. District officials said rates would decline again for the 2024-2025 school year because of Stride’s failures.”

Stride’s failure to operate in the public interest goes way back: “In 2011, for example, The New York Times profiled one of K12’s online schools, saying that by ‘almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.’ Six years later, a group of students from Yale published a study titled ‘K12 Inc.: Virtually Failing Our Students.’” They found that, ‘With no exceptions, students enrolled in K12 schools performed worse in math than their district and state counterparts. With only one exception, they performed worse in English and language arts.’ ”

The legal director of RAICES, a Texas immigrant support agency, Javier O. Hidalgo commented on the prison’s plan to open the school: “It makes sense that a private prison company would attract such a private education company… You’re profiting off of putting certain people into these jail settings, which is already disgusting, so it doesn’t surprise me that other companies that are in the business of profiting off people would be aligned with that… The intent absolutely is to be harmful … and try to punish these families for being here.”

Wimbish concludes: “The administration is forcing more longtime U.S. residents into immigration prisons, and plans to increase the number of prisoners even further next year…  It’s part of the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, which will significantly expand next year with more than $150 billion in tax dollars, including $45 billion for more facilities, a funding boost delivered in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Billionaires Are Undermining Public Education in America

Posted on by

In a series of articles dubbed “Billionaire Nation,” the Washington Post confirms what we have all sensed as we watch the operation not only of the Trump administration but also the massive investment by our richest citizens in the candidates and policy of our state legislatures.

In How Billionaires Took Over American Politics, the Post recounts the political story of our new Gilded Age: “In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics… Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times… In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections… By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared… (R)oughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people… America’s 902 billionaires are collectively worth more than $6.7 trillion, the most wealth ever amassed by the nation’s ultra-rich… A little more than a decade ago, there were half as many billionaires in the U.S….”

Our current politics reflect the rise of the billionaire class as well as the erasure of necessary regulation: “Economists say wealth is now more concentrated at the very top than at any time since the Gilded Age. The tech and market revolutions of recent decades have created riches on an unprecedented scale. Changing norms on executive compensation and lower-tax policies under Republican and Democratic administrations have helped insulate those fortunes. And in three landmark decisions, starting with 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, federal courts gutted post-Watergate campaign finance restrictions, clearing the way for donors to contribute unlimited money to elections.”

Clearly all this has shaped the second Trump administration. “Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies’ economic interests… Musk is the starkest example of the shift. He accounted for a sizable portion of the uptick in political spending in 2024, doling out $294 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans… The president installed about a dozen billionaires in his current administration… Trump’s Cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with a combined net worth of $7.5 billion… At the same time, Trump has championed a deregulation and tax cut agenda that is bringing huge benefits to wealthy Americans.”

Economist Joseph Stiglitz published a warning in the summer of 2024 in his book, The Road to Freedom: “There are two distinct aspects to the situation in the U.S.  The power dynamics are exacerbated by a political system in which money matters more than in most democracies. American elections are very expensive, and donors who make more campaign contributions (more rightly thought of as ‘political investments’) inevitably have more influence. Lobbying has also become a major business.” (p. 232) “To put it bluntly, ordinary citizens around the world have been sold a bill of goods. When there’s a problem, they’ve been told to ‘leave it to the market.’  They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems of externalities, coordination, and public goods. That’s wishful thinking. A well-functioning society needs rules, regulations, public institutions, and public expenditures financed by taxes.” (pp. 278-279)

While we have all been watching the operation of big money driving the power dynamics in Washington, D.C., just last week in its “Billionaire Nation” series, the Washington Post explored the role of big money in the legislative chambers across the states.  . In “Meet the Billionaire Pushing Taxpayer-Funded School Vouchers,” Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse profile the role of Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass investing in the promotion of his favorite ideology as he helps purchase state legislation for universal school vouchers. It is not as though Jeff Yass has had much recent experience with public schools; he educated his sons at “the Haverford School, a private school for boys on Philadelpia’s Main Line, where yearly high school tuition today costs nearly $48,000.” And he and some friends opened their own classical charter school.  But sixty-seven-year-old Yass formulated a commitment to his favorite ideology even before he made enough money to become “the 27th-richest  person in the world” through the “Susquehanna International Group, the behemoth trading firm.” “Yass’s political instincts began to form in his 20s, when he read economist Milton Friedman’s seminal work, ‘Capitalism and Freedom.’ He came away convinced of the value of free markets and idolizing Friedman himself.” Yass once personally asked Friedman for advice: “If you had a lot of philanthropic money, how would you spend it? His answer: ‘school choice.’ ”

According to Meckler, Reinhard and Morse, Yass regularly distorts the results of recent studies showing that private schools accepting vouchers are definitely not more academically effective than their public school counterparts: “But he also says he doesn’t really care what the studies say….  He takes the libertarian point of view that all parents should be empowered to choose the school—public or private—that they want for their children., no matter what.” “He argues that public schools are failing millions of children, and says those students deserve the chance to attend the school of their choice—private, religious, charter or traditional public—with taxpayer dollars.”

Yass has definitely been investing in school choice via universal vouchers, which he calls “his philanthropy,” even though he has not yet successfully been able to buy enough legislative power to produce universal voucher plans in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, and Nebraska, where voucher legislation he supported ultimately proved unsuccessful. However, he hasn’t give up.  He has already supported Vivek Ramaswamy, a supporter of Ohio school voucher expansion, in Ramaswamy’s 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio with a check for $10 million, for example.

Yass’s money did enable Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pass a universal voucher plan last April, 2025.  Abbott’s original 2023 drive for school vouchers failed in a state where vouchers would not be relevant in many rural districts lacking private schools where vouchers could be used. After 21 rural Republicans in the Texas House voted with Democrats to block the vouchers, Abbott tried a new strategy: backing pro-voucher Republicans to challenge the incumbents. “Yass gave $6 million to a political fund controlled by the governor, which Abbott’s campaign called the largest contribution in Texas history. He later gave $6 million more… Yass also donated $5.7 million that year to the Texas AFC Victory Fund, the political arm of the American Federation for Children… that spent $8 million working to defeat the anti-voucher Republicans… Most of the anti-voucher Republicans were defeated, and in April, the newly voucher-friendly Texas legislature approved a $1 billion program.”

In The Road to Freedom, economist Stiglitz discusses a term students learn about in Economics 101:  “Key questions of economic policy entail managing externalities—discouraging activities where there are harmful (negative) externalities and encouraging activities where there are positive externalities.” (p. 46)  Yass’s huge donations helped replace one set of state politicians with others who share his libertarian ideology without public conversation about the negative externalities of universal school voucher policies—their diversion of tax dollars away from the public schools that serve the majority of children—their failure to protect students’ civil rights—their exclusionary admissions policies—their failure to ensure teachers are qualified—their failure to protect the separation of religion and public life.

Jeff Yass epitomizes the power of the world’s 27th richest person to use his money to help politicians undermine the kind of public oversight that protects the majority of U.S. families who depend the provision of well funded public schools in rural, urban and suburban areas and the kind of public oversight that protects all students’ civil rights.  Here is the late political theorist Benjamin Barber speaking to the consequences for all of us of the growing power of money in our unequal society as billionaires increasingly dominate our politics:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Disillusionment: The Charter School Dream Has Utterly Collapsed

Posted on by

Launched in the mid-1990s, charter schools—publicly funded but privately operated—have been authorized to operate in 44 states with a mixed academic record and an appalling absence of public oversight by the state governments that made these public–private partnerships possible.

In July, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released Decline, the first installment of a new report, Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment and Cost, which concluded: “Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity… (the charter school sector) is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures—often sudden and disruptive—are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.”

In Disillusionment, the second installment of the Charter School Reckoning report, released last week, NPE addresses the question of why support for charter schools has declined over the educational experiment’s 30 year lifespan. Back in the mid-1990s, charter school advocates imagined they would be: “nimble, innovative, community-driven alternatives to traditional public schools—laboratories of experimentation led by teachers and grounded in equity.”  Why didn’t the dream work out?

With examples from across the states, NPE tells a four part story of the collapse of the charter school dream—a combined policy failure that has created an education sector dominated by fraud, corruption, and the theft of public tax dollars. Each section names the dream and exposes its collapse:

First:   “Aspiration: Charter schools will be teacher-led schools, rooted in community needs, where parents have a real voice.  Reality: About half of all charter schools are run by charter management organizations—some are for-profit corporations; others are nonprofit. All are disconnected from families and communities.”  We learn that, “In 1995, two years after Michigan passed its charter law, multi-millionaire businessman J.C. Huizenga, son of the founder of the for-profit garbage collection corporation, Waste Management, opened his National Heritage Academies… Today, more than 60% of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit companies.”  And, “In New York City, Eva Moskowitz, who heads the Success Academy chain, took home $1,018,977 in compensation in 2023—more than twice the salary of the Chancellor of the city”s nearly one-million-student public school system.”

Second:   “Aspiration: Less regulation of charter schools will unleash innovation.  Reality: Less regulation has resulted in mismanagement, profiteering, and scams.”  “Even if it can be argued that freedom from labor laws provides helpful flexibility, it is hard to see how exemptions from bidding laws, public oversight, and authorizer accountability—or the allowance of related-party transactions and for-profit management without financial transparency—are necessary ingredients for educational innovation.” “Ohio… has some of the most problematic charter laws in the nation. Roughly half of its charter schools… are operated by for-profit corporations, which flock to states with weak oversight and generous funding for charter schools. Across the country, for-profit entities manage charter schools in thirty-six states.”

Third:   “Aspiration: Renewable charter contracts with supervision provided by outside authorizers will create schools accountable to families and the public.  Reality:  Authorizer laws, which vary by state, have resulted in a steady stream of income for authorizers, weak oversight and, in some states, authorizer shopping that allows failed schools to continue… Only two states—Virginia and Kansas—grant local school districts exclusive authority to issue charters… Elsewhere, states have opened the authorizing business to a wide array of players—from small nonprofits to cash-strapped colleges—that can authorize charter schools, sometimes with little expertise in school oversight. When this broad access is paired with generous authorizing fees, a lucrative market emerges.”

Fourth:   “Aspiration: Charter schools will be run by teachers and parents, thus escaping bureaucracy.  Reality: Charter boards are nearly always composed of unelected individuals who may not even live in the state in which the charter is located. Often, they are connected to the school’s founders or management organization.” This section features a shocking story from Oklahoma: “Oklahoma’s largest virtual charter, EPIC Charter Schools, was technically governed by a nonprofit board—Community Strategies Inc.— but the real power rested with EPIC Youth Services… a private, for-profit management firm owned by the schools’ founders, David Chaney and Ben Harris. EYS took 10 percent of all taxpayer funding received by the charter school as a ‘management fee.’ According to Community Strategies Inc.’s 2020 Form 990, the taxpayer income to the school was $393,403,534, meaning the for-profit took in more than $39 million that year.”

I urge you to read the mass of stories reported from across the states in Disillusionment, published last week as the second installment of the Network for Public Education’s excellent comprehensive report. Reading the same story about state after state clarifies the danger of public policy based only on a lofty dream.

For me, as an Ohioan, it is fascinating to consider that nothing has changed since, 26 years ago, in a 1999 Akron Beacon Journal bombshell report, Whose Choice?,  Dennis Willard and Doug Oplinger exposed David Brennan’s White Hat Management Company: “White Hat runs 11 schools with 3,267 students and is projected to take in $16 million—or almost one of every three taxpayer-funded charter dollars… By next fall, Brennan and White Hat could have more than 30 charter schools in Ohio. By law, only nonprofit organizations, and not private for-profit companies, can start a charter school. But the nonprofits and Education Management Organizations work hand-in-hand, often so close it is difficult to determine which came first or if they truly are distinct entities.  For example, identical contracts for several White Hat Management-managed schools were submitted together to the state board, although the schools are supposed to be run by independent governing authorities—the private equivalent of school boards. These governing authority members, unlike public school board members, can have a financial interest in the schools, give contracts to friends and relatives without competitive bids, and are not required to undergo criminal background checks.”

The Network for Public Education’s new report concludes with recommendations for reform. As a cynical Ohioan, I wish I could imagine state legislators, susceptible to the power of lobbying and contributions to their political campaigns, who would be likely to adopt the reforms listed at the end of the report.  The recommended reforms are a guide, however, to what the public ought to demand when an appealing dream for public policy is proposed without the provision of necessary regulation and public oversight embedded as part of the plan.

In the case of charter schools, we ought to have known that when tax dollars are dangled in front of entrepreneurs, the kind of well-staffed, innovative, nurturing programs we dream about for children would likely evaporate into profits.

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley Decries Trump’s Abandonment of Our Society’s Vulnerable Children

Posted on by

In a profound and important Thanksgiving reflection, the President of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley considers our society’s abandonment, in this Trump era, of the institutions that protect the well-being of families and children:

“It’s a moment to ask: what kind of nation are we building for the next generation? Are we creating one in which children are cherished, families are supported, no child goes to bed hungry, and public institutions reflect the values we profess around the dinner table? Or are we drifting toward a model of isolation—where families are left to find for themselves, and childhood becomes a competition depending on how much parents can pay or how well they can game the system? … Unfortunately, federal policy increasingly reflects what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as an agenda of ‘organized abandonment.’ Public systems and partnerships once built to support families are being deliberately dismantled—from education to health to environmental safety.  Investments in children are declining dramatically, while parents are being told they must do it all alone.”

Lesley describes the “anti-state state” as a central goal of the Trump administration’s “proposals to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, the only federal agency solely dedicated to children’s domestic policy;  moves to undermine childhood vaccination programs and gut public health protections;  deep cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP);  denial of the full Child Tax Credit to low-income children and families who need it the most;  (and) efforts to weaken environmental and consumer product safety protections… The truth is that most parents don’t want to be left in isolation. Most parents don’t want to navigate every health, education, and safety concern on their own. They want teachers, doctors, and public officials to be their partners.”

Lesley cites Derek Black’s new book, Dangerous Learning, comparing our era to the post-Reconstruction period in the Southern states: “After the Civil War, as law professor Derek Black explains… the Freedmen’s Bureau helped build schools for formerly enslaved children and poor whites—a radical step toward equal opportunity for children. But when Reconstruction faltered and federal troops withdrew from the South, white supremacist violence surged, state constitutions were rewritten, and the Freedmen’s Bureau was dismantled. What followed was the imposition of Jim Crow laws, segregation, widespread underfunding of Black schools, and a reassertion of ‘local control’—a phrase that, then as now, often meant local control over who deserved an education and who didn’t.”

Today, explains Lesley, “we are watching history repeat itself yet again—not in the form of outright segregation, but in the dismantling of the federal infrastructure built to protect children’s rights. The rhetoric may have shifted from ‘states rights’ to ‘parental rights’ and from ‘neighborhood schools’ to ‘local control,’ but the underlying goal is chillingly similar. With both words and deeds, the proponents of destroying the Department of Education have made it crystal clear they wish to remove the federal government as a guarantor of  ‘equity and inclusion’… When we erase national commitments to fairness, children lose—especially children with the fewest resources, children of color and children with disabilities. Today’s proposals to eliminate the Department of Education follow the same pattern: retreat from progress, re-empower inequality, and reframe abandonment as freedom.”

Most parents want a partnership with their children’s teachers, with a good pediatrician, and with a librarian who shares wonderful books for children, writes Lesley.  By contrast, “The real goal of organized abandonment isn’t to strengthen families: it’s to strip public institutions of their supportive role, remove expert voices from the table, and cast families into a realm of individualized risk. It’s no coincidence that the same movement pushing ‘parental rights’ is also attacking school curriculum, banning books, attacking vaccines, and slashing school funding. By framing every institution—school, government, science—as suspect, families are left to fend for themselves in a confusing, politicized, and deeply unequal landscape.”

Once wealthier families disengage, “disinvestment becomes the default” in a cycle “that both reflects and reinforces the ideology of organized abandonment.  As supports disappear, families are scrambling to find private fixes, such as private tutors, private schools, and concierge medicine… those without means are left behind…. (A)s more families turn to private solutions, public investment becomes harder to sustain. Why fight for universal preschool if you’ve already paid for yours? Why push for safer schools if your child goes to private school?” “Nothing captures the logic of abandonment better than the race to secure preschool spots in elite programs… It’s a window into a society where families no longer trust the public system to offer their children a fair shot. Where early childhood education… is treated not as a public right but as a private luxury. And where isolation, not partnership, has become the default.”

Lesley concludes: “The dismantling of the Department of Education is not just about education… It’s the tip of a spear aimed at the very idea that children’s well-being is a public responsibility.  And it’s part of a broader campaign to shrink the village—slowly, deliberately, and with devastating consequences.”

Please do read Bruce Lesley’s important reflection on the danger of policy that abandons and undermines the public systems families have counted on for generations.

New Plan to Decimate U.S. Dept. of Ed. Exposes Trump Administration’s Deficient Educational Vision

Posted on by

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law professor Derek Black summarizes what has happened to public education in the United States during the lifetimes of most of us who are reading this post today:

“Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)

Happy Thanksgiving! This blog will take a short break. Look for a new post on Thursday, Dec. 4th. 

In 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Congress created the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill that mission by pulling together the federal agencies administering programs to increase educational opportunity for groups of children who had historically been marginalized.

It should, therefore, not be surprising that President Donald Trump, who has spent the year trying to stamp out every program or policy that protects equity and supports inclusion and diversity in public schools and across U.S. colleges and universities, has now implemented a plan to end the U.S. Department of Education.

Because federal law prescribes that only Congress can close a federal department or close one of the offices that Congress established within a federal department to manage particular programs, Trump began by keeping all the departments and offices but eliminating the people who do the work through the massive staff layoffs we have been watching all year long. Those layoffs, of course, constitute illegal impoundment of federal funds, and some of them have been temporary blocked by Federal District Courts. Then last Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced a further effort to phase out the Department under a new plan which complies with the law because it involves mere “interagency transfers” that will house Department of Education (DOE) programs in other departments, with some DOE staff moving with the programs to run them in their new setting. Although the transfers were announced last week, the interagency agreements were signed, according to Education Week, on September 30.

Chalkbeat‘s Erica Meltzer explains: “These changes were done administratively.  Senior officials said the Economy Act gives the Education Department the authority to contract with other federal agencies.”  The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel add: The interagency agreements amount to a work-around under which policy decisions will remain with the Education Department but the programs will be administered elsewhere. Staffers who work on the programs are expected to move to the new agency.”

Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel summarize the restructure announced last Tuesday: “Under the new agreements, the Labor Department will inherit the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college. The Education Department will move the Indian education program to the Interior Department, child care access and foreign medical education to the Department of Health and Human Services, and foreign-language education to the State Department.” “There was considerable speculation that the $15 billion program to support students with disabilities would be included in the announcement, but it was not. Other major functions of the Education Department, including its Office for Civil Rights and the federal student aid program, also were not affected by Tuesday’s changes, but a senior department official told reporters that officials are still exploring options for moving those programs elsewhere in the government.”  The Office for Civil Rights has already been decimated by the elimination of seven of its twelve regional offices and the layoff of most of its staff.

The NY Times‘ Michael Bender describes a senior official at the Education Department justifying the restructure as an attempt to “streamline bureaucracy so that ‘at the end of the day,’ it means more dollars to the classroom.” Bender quotes Secretary McMahon’s rationale: “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.” The attempt by Secretary McMahon and her staff to justify the interagency agreements as a step toward reducing the federal bureaucracy is laughable.

The Associated Press’s Colin Binkley highlights another of McMahon’s bizarre rationalizations for the restructure. McMahon resurrects the old “falling test scores” argument as though moving around federal offices will have some kind of miraculous effect on the nation’s economic inequality, which, according to research (here or here), is the primary factor causing overall disparities in students’ aggregate test scores. Binkley describes McMahon as predicting that, without federal oversight, the states are likely to use federal dollars to help the students most in need: “McMahon has increasingly pointed to what she sees as failures of the department as she argues for its demise. In its 45 years, she says, it has become a bloated bureaucracy while student outcomes continue to lag behind. She points to math and reading scores… which plummeted in the wake of pandemic restrictions. Her vision would abolish the Education Department and give states wider flexibility in how they spend money that’s now earmarked for specific purposes, including literacy and education for homeless students. That, however, would require approval from Congress.”

An extremely serious concern is what the proposed restructure says about the Trump administration’s narrow and inadequate understanding of the purpose of public education as mere workforce preparation.  Why is the Office of Primary and Secondary Education, which administers the enormous Title I grants that help promote equity in school districts serving concentrations of our nation’s poorest children, being moved to the Department of Labor?  The Washington Post‘s Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel quote a Department of Education official “who argued that education’s purpose is to prepare students for the workforce. ‘Nowhere is that better housed than the department of labor,’ she said.”  The reporters name the broader purpose of some of the programs being moved to the Department of Labor: “The K-12 grant programs that Labor stands to take on address a plethora of subjects not directly related to the workforce, such as support for children in poverty, after-school programs and aid for rural education.”  Historically, public schooling has been understood as the primary institution that forms students as the citizens of our democratic society—with workforce preparation merely one component of that mission.

The U.S. Department of Education was created to pull together the administration of federal programs that help public schools across the states serve and welcome every student and protect each student’s civil rights.  In a formal statement last week, Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick strongly opposed the new interagency agreements designed to phase out the U.S. Department of Education:

“The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason. And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing. Working alongside our early childhood educators, local school partners, and disability advocates as Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Disability Caucus, I’ve seen exactly how essential these programs are. Altering them without transparency or congressional oversight would pose real risks to the very students they were created to protect.  I will not allow it — and I urge all of my colleagues to stand with me.”